"The calm before the storm"

It was such a busy day in our school today and Shoko asked Shelley: “Why are there so many ladies coming into the school?” She said that all these ladies want to come and our school, Ohana International School, and see us and what we do each day. Miyuki came today; she is studying to be a preschool teacher in Nashville, Tennessee and she came back to Japan to see her family. She is going to come and work with us each day until the end of July and practice being a teacher. She is so excited to come as she loves children. While Shelley was talking to her, we did some activities at the tables. We used small printing stamps with animals, plants and insects on them. We named the different animals on them and then stamped them on our paper. We will take the paper home today so our families can see what they look like. They are really beautiful stamps. Our teachers think that it is important to recycle things and so the paper that we used for the stamping was actually art work that we had made a few months ago. We did string painting a long time ago and these are some of the left over paintings from then. Some of us wanted to use only white paper so we were really sensible and turned the paper over. We don’t need our teachers to do these kinds of things as we can think for ourselves and problem solve.

We also finished decorating the large pink hearts for our teacher’s birthday celebration on Wednesday 23rd May. We will be having a pizza lunch that day but will remind everyone about this nearer the date.

We have now completed everything for tomorrow, for our special Mother’s Day breakfast. We are soooooo excited to make breakfast for our mums and give them their special gifts. We are also happy to have some of our friends back from their long vacations. We missed them. We spent some time reading books and listening to our teachers reading stories to us. We also had a fun circle time as we sang a few new songs and some that we have not sung very often. We counted all of our friends and ended up with two boys and six girls. Our teachers remember when Ohana first started there were only boys and Shelley is absolutely delighted that there are more girls now. She was the only girl for an entire year at Ohana. After that we sang “If you are wearing (pink, blue, red etc) stand up” and we had to do different actions e.g. blow a kiss, pop our lips etc. We went through a few colours and then we sang our “Hello” song. Another lady who visited us today, her name is Nanako and she brought her little son with; his name is Lucas and she sang his name to us. We all sang our names first so that she knew the words when it was her turn to sing. We are always amazed when new people come to the school; they sit with us when we are singing and they learn the words of the song so quickly.

We want to remind our mums to please not eat breakfast tomorrow morning. We will be serving a scrumptious meal and juice so please keep space in your tummies.

Have a great afternoon and be safe if the storm comes.

Love always Shelley, Darren, Sabine and Kana